That insight comes care of Gerhard Blickle, a psychologist at the
University of Bonn in Germany.

A study his team just published shows how being
able to read emotions helps you navigate the workplace — and thus
make more money.

According to Blickle, people who excel at recognizing
emotions "are considered more socially and politically skilled
than others by their colleagues. Their supervisors also attribute
better social and political skills to these people. And, most
notably, their income is significantly higher."

In the experiment, 142 adults were asked to look at pictures and
listen to recordings of actors and children expressing their
feelings.

The participants were asked to say what emotion — sadness,
anger, happiness, etc. — was behind the expression.

The average success rate was 77%, with the "really good"
recognizers identifying 90% of emotions and the poor recognizers
hitting 60%.

After the test, researchers followed up by asking the
participants' colleagues and supervisors how politically savvy
they were — if they seemed sincere, influential, and formed
relationships quickly at work.

The team replicated the study with 156 different participants and
controlled for sex, age, training, working hours, and
title.

"We controlled for all these variants," Blickle
reports. "The effect of the ability to recognize emotions on
income still remained."

The business case for emotional intelligence is so strong that
some forward-thinking companies have started to incorporate it
into hiring and management.

In the 1990s, L'Oreal started using emotional intelligence in its
hiring of salespeople. Those hired with consideration of their
emotional know-how sold $91,370
more on average per year than their peers, for a net revenue
increase of over $2.5 million.

More recently, Chicago pizza empire Lou Malnati's has been
putting emotional intelligence at the center of its
business.

"It has nothing to do with Chicago pizza, but most of the time,
we have nothing to do with Chicago pizza,"
CEO Marc Malnati told Business Insider. "There are 2,400
people in the company, and the biggest job is to maintain
relationships and care about people."